5 Tips to Grow Your YouTube Channel

If so, fear not, this is a common problem for many new (and sometimes established) YouTube channels. First things first here, do not give up if you don’t instantly see hundreds of subscribers flooding to your channel. These things take time and perseverance, but the rewards can be fantastic.

Tip 1: Consistency is key

Some of the most successful YouTube channels all have the same thing in common – upload consistency and scheduling. Whether that be uploading on a particular day or at a particular time, your viewers need to know when to check back on your channel for your latest upload.

This is a great way of building a fanbase on YouTube as viewers can factor in watching your video as part of their daily or weekly routine.

One of the best ways to ensure consistency with your channel is to develop a video upload schedule. This way you can incorporate the video into your diary and ensure that you never miss an upload.

Tip 2: Call to action

If you want people to subscribe to your channel, tell them! This may sound overly simplistic but it is something that is often forgotten by creators and brands on YouTube. There are many ways in which you can feature a subscribe call to action in your video, but the most commonly used is by featuring it in your end card or outro.

Remind the viewer to subscribe to your channel if they enjoyed watching your video – you will be surprised by how effective this method can be! You could also add an annotation to your video asking viewers to subscribe to your channel by clicking the subscribe button below the video.

Tip 3: Interact with viewers

Once the views start coming in to your videos, you may notice that people start to leave comments on the videos. This is a fantastic way to interact with your viewers and allows you to speak directly with the people who are engaging with your content.

This gives you a great opportunity to develop new video ideas based on their feedback or ways in which you can improve your channel. Be sure to link to your social media pages from your YouTube channel too so that people can engage with you on social media.

Tip 4: Annotations and watermarks

Watermarks allow viewers to easily subscribe to your channel directly from the video watch page. They are also a great way to add some consistent branding to all of your videos. Watermarks can easily be set up via the InVideo Programming section of your channel settings on YouTube.

Annotations are another great feature from YouTube. They can help make your videos stand out and can encourage users to engage with your videos. Annotations can be used in a variety of different ways, from simply adding a call to action, such as subscribe to your channels, to linking to other similar videos that you have created.

However, do bear in mind that annotations do not currently work on mobile devices (although I’m sure this is something that YouTube are working on).

Tip 5: Optimise your video titles and meta data

In order for your video to get found on YouTube, you need a clear title that entices viewers to click on your video. Before naming your video, have a think about the keywords that you would associate with that particular video. You could use a tool such as Google’s keyword planner to research keywords and identify the high volume search terms.

After you have thought about your target keywords, ensure that your primary target keyword for your video is at the very beginning of the title. This is because YouTube’s algorithm assigns more value to the keywords at the beginning of your video title than the ones at the end. You can then place your branding at the end of the title. When creating a video title, it is important that your title accurately portrays what is in the video.

N.B. If your title is deemed to be misleading in any way, you will find your audience retention rate dramatically drop as viewers click off of your video.

You can also utilise the description box underneath every video to really tell potential viewers exactly what your video is about. This is a great opportunity to really sell your video – so make the most! Whilst is important to include relevant keywords in your description to aid in the discovery of your video, ensure that your description reads well and doesn’t appear to be too keyword spammy.

When you are writing your description, keep in mind that only the first 3 sentences show in the search results and above the fold on the video watch page.

While growing your subscriber numbers on YouTube can take time, ensuring that you have all of the points listed above could certainly increase your chances of becoming the next YouTube star.